Leveraging Automation to Realign Operational Infrastructure and Enable Nursing Professional Development Practice at the Top of Specialty Training.

Nursing professional development (NPD) practitioners design and evaluate continuing education to improve practice, yet the supporting infrastructure is often manual and burdensome and vulnerable to record-keeping errors. This quality improvement initiative redesigned nursing continuing professional development (NCPD) approval workflows using standardized intake, centralized data management, and automation for administrative tasks while preserving NPD practitioner judgment. The redesigned workflow was associated with an estimated annual reduction of 245 NPD practitioner hours, supporting more sustainable use of professional expertise.